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I received my MP6 today and played it for the last 6 hours or so. I know that many people have already shared excellent and thorough opinions/reviews on this forum, that's why I'll try to share some brief points for the statistics

- As with CA63, the default touch curve is way too sensitive and I set it to heavy where it feels most natural.

- Believe it or not, I seem to enjoy the MP6 keyboard much more than that of CA63. MP6 feels livelier, lighter, quicker, more responsive and less tiring. In contrast CA63 feels very heavy and sluggish and usually I felt pain in my wrists after few hours of playing.

- The Ivory touch feels different. Maybe it needs some time and some sweat but currently it feels like I am touching a resin and at this very moment I can feel my arms as though they've been covered with talc powder, they don't slip against each other. I still feel it even after I washed my hands with soap. I'll report on this again after few weeks/months of playing.

- Default piano sound is very similar to CA63 and at the same time there's some slight tin-like overtone which was not present on CA63. I suppose that's what differentiates UPHI and PHI. I would agree that if one doesn't know there's a difference it would be harder for him to discover that difference. Yet CA63 sound a bit better in acoustic piano department.

- The piano sound is bright but lowering EQ high frequencies helps to make it softer.

- Main Rhodes is excellent and is a perfectly good balance as a start point for tweaking - not too bright, not too dark, so you can alter it the way you want. The amp simulation is killer.------------------------

Here's some stuff that I don't like and I feel these will irritate me much in future:

- Touch response is a global setting (not a per sound option), and I found I needed heavy touch for the acoustic pianos only. Thus switching between acoustic piano and Rhodes (and all the rest) requires also switching the touch response each time.

- There doesn't seem to be a way to see whether EQ has been applied or not. You need to press the EQ button and look values on the screen to figure out if there are some tweaks applied. Also, there's no easy way to quickly switch on/off the EQ. Of course, you can assign it to the SW button, however I prefer other functions assigned to that button.

- Same applies to ADSR envelope.

- There's no compressor and this must be a huge mistake I did since I thought it had one. It's really an important feature for me, especially for live playing. I am somehow disappointed but I'll have to live with that and it's my fault that I didn't dig too much in the manual before buying it.

- There's no easy way to apply two effects on a sound. There is some workaround: use one and same sound in two zones with different effects, but the results are a little bit unpredictable.

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What could be better:

- The two modes: SOUND and SETUP are confusing and not quite intuitive. What I realized is that you're always in a setup where you can have 4 zones. So, SOUND mode is not an alternative to the SETUP mode, it's rather a sub-mode of SETUP mode where you are choosing the sound for a zone in the current setup. It's not wrong, it's just a little bit counterintuitive and semantically inconsistent.

- The "startup setup" is redundant and I can't see how it makes sense. Once you switch to another setup, you can't reload the "startup setup" unless you restart the instrument. That's stupid. What they have to do is to provide a way to choose which of the stored setups will be loaded at startup so that you can always return to it even if you've switched to another setup and without a need to restart the instrument. It's just another confusing and semantically incorrect feature.

- Whenever you change something in the system settings and then press any button, it stores automatically the changed setting for a second or two and the instrument is nor responsive during that time and you can't play it. This is yet another engineering quirk as with the previous points.

The v1.10 update improved the touch curve significantly (along with a number of other fixes/updates), so I'm a little surprised that you still prefer 'Heavy', although these are all rather personal preferences.

Congratulations on the new MP6, CyberGene! That's a great initial analysis, and it accords pretty much with my own findings.

With regard to the interface anomalies, I've found that you get used to the system very quickly, and navigation is not really an issue for me. I totally agree about not being able to see at a glance what the EQ or drive settings are - that's a pain, so I tend to set them and leave them.

The custom velocity settings - of which there are two, if I'm remembering correctly - are very useful for getting a feel that you can live with for most sounds. Before OS version 1.10, it was essential to use these, as the default curves gave a sense of disconnect with, particularly, the AP sounds. It's a lot better now, but I still tend to stick to a custom curve.

Good luck with it, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts as you get used to the MP6.

Edit: sorry, didn't see the last two posts re the OS before posting.

Last edited by voxpops; 06/04/1207:50 PM.

"you don't need to have been a rabbit in order to become a veterinarian"

I am not sure but I think "normal" on MP6 is actually better than "normal" on CA63. Furthermore, "heavy" on MP6 is also better than "heavy" on CA63. I am not sure if this makes any sense

What I mean is "normal" on CA63 is way too sensitive and "heavy" on CA63 is way too heavy. On MP6 there's not such a huge gap, and it's certainly more subtle. I think it may have to do with the different key action as well.

Gosh, I can't get asleep! I was about to watch the season finale of Game of Thrones on my computer and then go to the bed for the last three hours, but instead I am constantly running round the MP6 I think I like it more than the CA63 in terms of touch, it's closer to what I felt in Yamaha CP5 keyboard. I've finally convinced myself I prefer lighter and less sluggish keyboards. OK, I am going to see that Game of Thrones episode finally

I was able to reproduce it on CA63 and yes, I have the latest firmware installed(1.09). I hope Kawai will fix this in the future.

There's another bug related to the string resonance I sometimes run into: when playing lots of chords very fast, the resonance doesn't get 'reset'. Then if I hit a note, there's this big 'boom' that comes along with it. Powering off and on fixes the problem. When it happens again (I can't reproduce it all the time), I'll try to make a video and uploaded it.

Thanks for the review CyberGene. Would you rate the MP6 as a midi controller? How would you rate the MP6 against the Yamaha CP33 presuming you had a chance to play the yamaha action on the P155/Cp33 please?Thanks in advance

Providence, I haven't tried to hook the MP6 to my laptop yet to test it with software instruments but I'll certainly do that soon and will report back.

Regarding the action comparison between CP33 and MP6, provided it's the same Yamaha GH action as in the P90 which I've owned, I would certainly prefer the Kawai action over the Yamaha. Yamaha GH is a heavy and sluggish action and although I had grown with it and used to love it, I wouldn't buy anything with a GH action in it. It is a dated design. What was an arguably excellent hammer action 7 years ago is now only lagging behind competing actions. However the NW-action in Yamaha CP5 is a different story but it's also an expensive one.

Would you rate the MP6 as a midi controller? How would you rate the MP6 against the Yamaha CP33

I don't know if you cared about comparing their MIDI controller functions, but the MP6 is much more capable. I believe the main differences are: 4 zones instead of 2, 256 definable presets instead of 14, an extra footswitch jack, 4 assignable knobs separate from the faders.

Interesting about touch response only being global. I am very tempted by the MP6 and on reading the manual I thought I understood that touch was a parameter you could set for each setup. That wouldn't be as useful as setting it per sound but it would get round the problem. Perhaps Kawai James knows the correct answer?

James, I found something which may be a bug or a feature. For all the reverbs, if I increase the reverb depth (because the default one is too low and reverbs are barely audible), I can hear something like a detuning, similar to chorus effect. Here's a demo:Kawai MP6 Reverb

You can hear few notes without reverb, then with reverb.

For this example I've used Hall 1 reverb and a max depth of 127 in order to show it easily.

Maybe that's Kawai's understanding of proper reverberation or maybe it's a bug but I would like to hear any opinion from other people and of course I'll be glad if you can bring that to the engineering team for their opinion. I haven't noticed anything like that on CA63 or any other digital piano, even when the reverb depth is increased extremely.

I am not sure how noticeable it is by the audio demo, however in actual playing it's slightly irritating and distracting. When I tried to increase the reverb for the first time today I was immediately surprised and thought I may have enabled a chorus by mistake.

Thanks for this review and other posts you made in other thread about your opinion of this MP6.

I am about buying MP6 also.But, if I eventually buy it at the end, I don't have any choice other than will buy it directly from the manufacturer.Yes...finally, they will start to sell it in Indonesia where it is made But to wait until they open a dealer, I don't think it is a good idea. (I can't stand to wait that long to play this great dp ;))I made a phone call to the manufacturer and they say yes, i can buy it directly from them.

the problem is I haven't tried this dp, but from reviews I read and from spec comparison I made, I think this is a great dp.I have tried Yamaha CLP430, Kurzweil SP4-8, and CP50.comparing Kawai MP6 with those dp/stage piano, how is the touch action of this mp6?could you help me to grade from the lighter to the more weight action?Thank you

editoh yea, those DPs are in the same price range in Indonesia, except CP50 which has a little bit higher price.so, comparing those DP would be a valid enough comparison

Compared to both CLP-430 and CP50, MP6 action feels lighter. I personally don't like the initial resistance of Yamaha GH and GH3 action which makes them feel sluggish and difficult for playing. I haven't played SP4-8 but I believe it has the same Fatar action as Nord keyboards, and in my opinion that's a very unrealistic and sub-standard piano action.